Meet President Obama's Official Videographer

Arun Chaudhary, a former NYU film instructor, is the first person to hold the job of White House videographer. According to today's New York Times profile, he is "part documentarian, part White House-message-machine post. He travels with the president on roughly two-thirds of his trips, documenting the behind-the-scenes occasions and public theatrics."



Using only his handheld videocamera and laptop, Chaudhary compiles his video highlights into a weekly roundup, "West Wing Week," which appears on WhiteHouse.gov every Friday. (See this week's episode below.)

The profile depicts Chaudhary as a perpetually disheveled man on the go, scrambling to both keep up with President Obama and keep out of his way -- though the boss offers his personal documentarian the ultimate accolade: "a very cool guy."

Like official White House photographers, Chaudhary is part historian, part propagandist, searching for and releasing only the President's most flattering moments. But that is not without precedent.

Since at least the time of President Ronald Reagan, successive White Houses have understood the power of video, investing time and effort into creating images for television to record.

But Obama aides have gone a step further, creating imagery and then filming it themselves, knowing they can inject it into the media bloodstream because of video-sharing sites like YouTube and the increased appetite for new media and technology.

But Chaudhary claims he is taking the long view, and capturing history in the making for future generations to savor -- especially the largely unseen candid side of President Obama, even the awkward or unflattering moments. All those deleted scenes and outtakes are preserved on huge storage servers and will become part of the official record in the presidential library.

As with videojournalists, Chaudhary finds the best moments are the unanticipated ones -- the private interactions that occur between the official staged events. “Whether you are in the United Nations or a castle in Prague," he notes, "anything can happen, and probably will, in the hallway.”

Here's this week's episode of West Wing Week:

My Student, The First Photographer

Forgive me while I kvell about a couple of former students...

First, congrats to Pete Souza, on his Today Show appearance — and on his appointment as the official White House photographer for Barack Obama.

It's been a stellar year for Pete... and a stellar career.

Pete's book "The Rise of Barack Obama" made the New York Times' bestseller list in 2008. Pete was working for the Chicago Tribune when he began covering the president-elect long before Barack Obama became a household name.

Pete actually will know his way around the White House better than our new president, as Pete also was the official White House photographer for Ronald Reagan! Pete published a book of images from those years titled "Images of Greatness: An Intimate Look at the Presidency of Ronald Reagan."

You can enjoy his online portfolio here, with pictures not only of Reagan and Obama, but ranging from Wrigley Field to post-9/11 Kabul.

Pete was in one of my earliest photojournalism classes at Boston University, back in ... well, a few years ago.

And to prove that I'm a bipartisan professor, my former San Francisco State University student Shawn Thew has scored the current cover of Rolling Stone magazine -- with an image of a forlorn looking George W. Bush that was used for a humorous photo-illustration.

Keep up the great work, guys! Just call me Proud Prof!